1000 days to get it right for every child

POSTED: 19 November 2014

The first 1000 days of a child’s life are critical to their long term development. One thousand days is also approximately the duration of one term of parliament. So either way we have about 1000 days to get it right. The future of New Zealand depends on it.

Getting it right in those first thousand days means today’s young children are given every opportunity to develop their full potential as healthy, emotionally mature, socially engaged and well-educated, productive adults. Read more.

We already invest quite a lot of money into giving kids a good start – just over US$14,339 in the first five years according to the OECD. Unfortunately that is less than the average spend of all OECD countries (US$ 30,187). And a lot less than Australia spends (US$29753.7).

The OECD has also found that New Zealand has among the worst child outcomes in the developed world. We rank 28th out of 30 countries.

That low and ineffective public investment in the early years of childhood costs us dearly – approximately 3 per cent of GDP or $6 billion.

Things need to change. That’s why we are campaigning to make it a priority issue through the 1000 days of this term of parliament.